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I want it to be blocked for a different reason. The fediverse has always been small enough that the content is "underground" and interesting. Some of the people

I want it to be blocked for a different reason. The fediverse has always been small enough that the content is "underground" and interesting. Some of the people on there are weird or completely different than me and that's what makes them so interesting. That's not the case on something like Twitter and Instagram. Good and actually interesting content is drowned out between your average tweets and posts about nothing at all. Or all the content sucks and is there for the sake of exposure, likes, clicks etc. But I don't want mastodon to be overrun by 100M users' uninteresting content! I don't even want them in the replies of posts. Mastodon has consistently been great before this while Twitter fiasco. I wish it never happened, I don't want the space I have liked for years to change and be ruined. Maybe an apt analogy would be the difference between Marginalia and Google as search engines. Why would one want the interesting underground search engine to be filled with SEO spam and ads?

sanderjd 3y ago
I think this privacy thing is incomprehensible, but this makes total sense to me.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
You know what, you've convinced me. I've been rooting for some kind of society-at-large network to succeed at federation (I was so optimistic I tried bitclout, and more recently bluesky. Both want to be a single global database to send money or to index hashtags and blocklists globally) I really believed that discoverability is king, and I should just be able to search a global graph of user profiles and read everything that everyone has ever said, but you're right, there's a lot of conversations that don't happen in public, and not everyone wants to be "discoverable". So I think there's a case to embrace the balkanization of social media, and go back to having separate identities to be a part of each phpbb we signed up to. Going to different domains to talk to different groups of people makes sense, and we can have the modicum of privacy offered by a semi-private chat server like discord, so that your messages don't get indexed by google and archived forever. (Obviously discord retains all the message logs, DMs included, but at least its not publically searchable) And global social media is always going to suffer eternal september. Smaller, unfederated chat communities is a probably a much healthier approach to social media than whatever it is we've been doing the last decade of meta-gramming
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Spend a few days in some large Facebook groups or on any active Twitter thread and one comes to this conclusion very quickly: online semi-anonymous interaction does not scale. Cannot scale. Putting aside the concerns about the dark patterns brought by the companies seeking revenue from it, I just don't think human beings are capable of working in these kinds of mediums in a way that doesn't degrade to a lowest common denominator of shitty behaviour. There's just no way to get enough moderation in place and get people to behave respectfully, and then it just gets ugly. I remember BBSes back in the 80s degrading to uncomfortable useless places simply because of a few bad trolls or assholes getting in the mix. Now it's just ridiculous. Small, comfortable social networks and a feed that I can fully control, that's what I want. Facebook and Twitter began their misdeeds the moment they rolled out algorithmic suggested content that I did not explicitly subscribe to. I've mostly just retreated into a few discord channels for family and friends at this point, with forays into Mastodon here and there. Oh, and way too much time on this orange site.

sanderjd 3y ago

I think this privacy thing is incomprehensible, but this makes total sense to me.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

You know what, you've convinced me. I've been rooting for some kind of society-at-large network to succeed at federation (I was so optimistic I tried bitclout, and more recently bluesky. Both want to be a single global database to send money or to index hashtags and blocklists globally) I really believed that discoverability is king, and I should just be able to search a global graph of user profiles and read everything that everyone has ever said, but you're right, there's a lot of conversations that don't happen in public, and not everyone wants to be "discoverable". So I think there's a case to embrace the balkanization of social media, and go back to having separate identities to be a part of each phpbb we signed up to. Going to different domains to talk to different groups of people makes sense, and we can have the modicum of privacy offered by a semi-private chat server like discord, so that your messages don't get indexed by google and archived forever. (Obviously discord retains all the message logs, DMs included, but at least its not publically searchable) And global social media is always going to suffer eternal september. Smaller, unfederated chat communities is a probably a much healthier approach to social media than whatever it is we've been doing the last decade of meta-gramming

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Spend a few days in some large Facebook groups or on any active Twitter thread and one comes to this conclusion very quickly: online semi-anonymous interaction does not scale. Cannot scale. Putting aside the concerns about the dark patterns brought by the companies seeking revenue from it, I just don't think human beings are capable of working in these kinds of mediums in a way that doesn't degrade to a lowest common denominator of shitty behaviour. There's just no way to get enough moderation in place and get people to behave respectfully, and then it just gets ugly. I remember BBSes back in the 80s degrading to uncomfortable useless places simply because of a few bad trolls or assholes getting in the mix. Now it's just ridiculous. Small, comfortable social networks and a feed that I can fully control, that's what I want. Facebook and Twitter began their misdeeds the moment they rolled out algorithmic suggested content that I did not explicitly subscribe to. I've mostly just retreated into a few discord channels for family and friends at this point, with forays into Mastodon here and there. Oh, and way too much time on this orange site.